US seeks Iran support for Afghan supply

The administration of U.S. President Barack Obama is mulling a plan that would use Iranian territory to rescue the deteriorating logistics network currently used to supply U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, administration officials said.

As first reported by the Iranian media, William Perry, secretary of defense under former U.S. President Bill Clinton and a high-level group of non-proliferation specialists held four meetings with Iranian diplomats in The Hague and Vienna last year to discuss the matter.

Perry and the American group were traveling under the auspices of the Pugwash Group, an international cadre of scientists that advocates abolition of nuclear weapons and which won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1995.

Among the Iranians attending was Ali Asghar Soltanieh, permanent representative to the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna and the Iranian ambassador, considered a major player in the Iranian leadership, according to U.S. officials.

“Soltanieh has the ear of people who count,” said one.

The idea of using Iranian commercial purchasers and Iranian transportation channels is gaining in momentum as the U.S. and NATO logistics network rapidly deteriorates, U.S. officials said.

“It’s a mess,” said former CIA counterterrorism chief Vince Cannistraro.

According to Cannistraro and serving U.S. officials, the current supply route into Afghanistan that runs from Karachi to Kabul is so insecure that the Pakistani trucking companies that haul goods and sundries into Afghanistan halted deliveries late last year, because neither the trucks nor their drivers were secure from attacks by militants.

Late last year, a big attack in the Peshawar area destroyed about 160 trucks bound for Afghanistan, according to published reports. The attackers were hundreds of militant jihadis, these sources said.

The head of the Khyber Transport Association, M.S. Afridi, was quoted in December threatening to continue the suspension until supply depots were moved from Peshawar’s outskirts, a main point of vulnerability, to a less vulnerable area, and only intense U.S. pressure got the shipments resumed, U.S. officials said.

The Khyber Transport Association operates about 3,500 trucks.

A former U.S. official confirmed that many trucks and their loads are looted in broad daylight, and their drivers killed or kidnapped. Drivers of the convoys are suspected of complicity with the raiders, and the goods are then sold on the Peshawar black market, he said.

With Obama recently planning to boost U.S. troops in Afghanistan, the U.S.-NATO forces will require some 3,500 tons of fuel and 250 tons of water per day, U.S. officials said. The pressing urgency of the need was made worse when the government of Kyrgyzstan recently denied the United States the use of its vast base at Manas to backstop the air war and help with resupply.

Russia offered railway routes to send in materiel, but loads were restricted to non-lethal goods, U.S. officials said. In addition, trains traveling from Russia to Afghanistan via the Russia-Kazakhstan-Uzbekistan route would be charged “extortionate customs and transit fees,” amounting to $300 to $500 per ton, the costs of which could rise far higher if the administration beefs up its military activities.

In addition, the goods from Russia have to be shipped by road into the battle areas located in the middle and south of the country. U.S. officials said the supplies would probably use the Soviet-built Salang Tunnel which was under constant attack by the Afghan mujahedin during the 1980s war.

It is hardly a surprise the Obama administration would turn to Iran since the best and shortest highway networks run between Tehran and Kabul.

According to the director of research for the Washington Institute for Middle East Policy, Pat Clawson, the Obama plan would have Iran make commercial purchases of food, water, toilet paper, and other “non-strategic items,” then send them into Afghanistan via its “own commercial channels,” he said.

If approved, the bilateral arrangement using Iran “would substantially reduce the logistics burden of the United States,” said Clawson.

The arrangement makes sense. In spite of all the squaring off between the United States and Iran over Tehran’s nuclear program, Iran has its own strategic interests in Afghanistan and is unremittingly hostile to the Taliban and al-Qaida. Both countries exchanged intelligence on both groups during the 2001 war, Cannistraro said.

Former National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brezezinski agreed, saying Thursday at a Senate hearing that Iran and the United States had engaged in bilateral dialogue on Afghanistan back in 2001. “We had a rather constructive relationship … regarding the Taliban issue in Afghanistan,” he said.

A former CIA official said that what Iran is looking for is “a quid pro quo” – an end to the covert activities set afoot by the defunct George W. Bush administration. These included a plan to set off a small electro-magnetic pulse (EMP) explosion near key Iranian nuclear sites that would fry the electronic grids essential to the operation of the program.

Using Iran as a base for U.S.-NATO resupply may already apply to more than “non-strategic goods.” Although diesel fuel for allied forces is brought in from Pakistan, one U.S. intelligence source said that some 10,000 tons of jet fuel per month is already entering Afghanistan via Iran.